TLC 248/7 Online

The April 6 edition of The Living Church is available online to registered subscribers. G. Jeffrey MacDonald writes in this edition’s cover story, “Muhlenberg’s Vision Thrives”:

In North Philadelphia’s poverty-stricken Allegheny West neighborhood, where nearly half of all children never finish high school, those who attend the three-year-old St. James School are easy to spot. They’re the children who wear crisp crimson blazers as they stride past boarded up homes on their way to middle school. On weekends, they’re the ones leading garbage cleanup projects in the streets.

These aren’t well-off kids. All 46 come from families earning no more than $22,000 a year; some earn as little as $4,000. They attend school tuition-free, with help from hundreds of donors. And they bear the fruits of a particular strain of Episcopal education, one that’s aggressively tapping insights from the 19th-century Church School movement and its focus on character formation to meet 21st-century challenges.